AW: Representative sample of industry protocols

> Exactly. Why would you even try to standardise bindings to all of these protocols?
This is something we need to clarify in the charter and WoT work in general: we are not aiming at prescriptive bindings that have to be implemented, but at descriptions on how to use vanilla protocol stacks (e.g., HTTP, CoAP, MQTT, etc.) to communicate with a particular platform (think OCF CoAP vs LWM2M CoAP vs OneM2M CoAP vs OneM2M HTTP).
What we want to standardize is how to represent all the information needed to create a message that can be understood by the targeted device. As a consequence, you would get uniform APIs for different protocol stacks.
Just a quit test to find the right wording: would “Protocol Mapping” be a better term? :)

> Why not define a single protocol binding for the Web of Things (HTTP, upgradeable to WebSockets for events)? Device or gateway implementations can map HTTP to non-web protocols on the back end wherever necessary.

Many members of the WoT group are interested to simplify the communication with the actual device and also enable harmonized device-to-device communication. By doing so, we also significantly reduce the effort for implementing such gateways.

> As an example, my team is currently working on a REST+WebSockets API for a gateway which uses ZigBee and ONVIF/WiFi on the back end. Another team previously created bindings to Z-Wave.

When these two gateways are harmonized and you do not have to care about any specifics when talking to either a ZigBee or a Z-Wave device, then this is already a good step towards WoT. Such abstractions will become better when you looked at more protocols und understand their particularities. This is why we want to look at the most important players in the IoT and if possible at more.

A question for me now would be how you made those WebSockets interoperable. See the other thread for that ;)

Best wishes
Matthias